Page:The youth of Washington (1910).djvu/168

 *nor Dinwiddie, and indeed we rarely submitted with entire good will to any of the royal governors. He got his grant at last, but a committee was to confer with him as to how it was to be used—a measure not altogether unwise, but which made him swear we were getting to be too republican and, he feared, would be more and more difficult to be brought to order.

As to my recruiting, the better men were indisposed to join, and I got chiefly a vagabond crew of shoeless, half-dressed fellows, but most of them hunters and good shots. I did better when the governor offered a bounty in land, which as yet we had not, for it was to be about the fine bottoms at the Forks of the Ohio, which were in the hands of the French and the Indians.

I made Van Braam a captain, and there-*after obtained more men and better, for the old warrior promised, I fear, an easy time and all manner of agreeable rewards, with such accounts of the lands they were to have as much delighted the hard-working farmers' sons.

On April 2 I left Alexandria, with orders to secure tools and build roads, for Colonel